Canadian Police wants a law to get everyone’s computer passwords

One of the best thing you can do nowadays is to encrypt your password so it will be protected from hackers and to secure all your online activities. Recently, this news about the Canadian cops who wants to force all the citizens to hand over all their own passwords has been in the headlines for the past days.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP), an organization with membership from across the country, passed this resolution at their annual conference last August 22, 2016, Tuesday. By implementing this law, the Canadian police is to force everyone to hand over their computer passwords to the police only with the judge’s consent, CTV Reported

“To say this is deeply problematic is to understate the matter, we have all kinds of laws that do not compel people to incriminate themselves or even speak. A law that compels people to give police access to their devices, which may contain messages, photos, and data that have nothing to do with any active criminal investigation, doesn’t fit within Canada’s current legal landscape and would be ‘tricky constitutionally’.”, said Micheal Vonn, policy director for the BC Civil Liberties Association.

“I’d question whether this proposal is constitutional,” said Tamir Israel, a lawyer for the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. “It’s rare to force people to help police investigate themselves, and for good reason,” Israel continued. “It shifts the focus of criminal condemnation away from actual criminal activity and onto compliance. So if an individual legitimately objects to handing over their password, that alone makes them criminal.”

The CACP posted a report regarding the challenges of gathering electronic evidence from the International Association of Chiefs of Police as background for their annual conference, this is suggesting that pushing a law to get peoples’ passwords is related to some recent US cases like the Apple’s refusal to unlock an iPhone for the FBI. They are merely an advocacy body and resolutions they pass have no effect on the law of the land. Moreover, the organization has a history of asking for powers that go well beyond what the law currently allows.

Some of the citizens of the North America were noticed by some police that they were using anonymity-boosting tools like the encrypted Tor browser or even VPNsthat are being used to protect people on surveillances and from hacking. But the problem with this is that there are some criminals who are “going dark”- people who are operating online and these encryption tools are helping them masked their identities to stay anonymous.

Even if this has a legal seek, the production and preservation of data that is held by the telecommunications companies, some of the investigators discover that the material has already deleted because Canada doesn’t have data retention standards, Joe Oliver, RCMP Assistant Commissioner said last Tuesday.

“This has been a standard component of what the chiefs of police do—they argue for laws that would make policing easier, but is it a good idea from a civil liberties perspective? No.” Vonn ended.